April 09, 2018

Nimmi Rangaswamy: Stories from India on mobile internet & Facebook use of slum youth; technology as a force for good; the access & (corporate) ethics of technology

49 minutes

Nimmi Rangaswamy has an extensive experience in the technology space that spans both academia and the business sector. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Indian institute of Technology, IIT, Hyderabad where she teaches courses at the intersections of society and technology.

Formerly, she worked as a senior research scientist and lead the Human Interactions research area at the Xerox Research Center India. She was also part of Microsoft Research running studies of patterns of technology adoption in various social contexts and spaces in India, ranging from middle-class consumption of domestic media, the business models of cyber cafés and the use of mobile internet and Facebook among urban slum youth.

In this episode we talk to Nimmi about why some people consider technology “evil” and she doesn’t and how people make mobile and social media technologies their own. We will also be talking about topics such as access to technology in India as well as the corporate ethics of working with technology. Nimmi will also share her experience of working in the corporate sector and what is the value of anthropology to advance technological knowledge.

Nimmi Rangaswamy - LinkedIn

Nimmi’s work:

You can visit Nimmi’s profile at the sites below:

https://sites.google.com/a/iith.ac.in/dr-nimmi-rangaswamy/

https://www.iiit.ac.in/people/faculty/nimmi.rangaswamy/

Nimmi Rangaswamy, Sumitra Nair (2010) “The Mobile Phone Store Ecology in a Mumbai Slum Community: Hybrid Networks for Enterprise” in ITD, volume 6, Issue 3, Fall, Special Issue IFIP.

(Full article available here: http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/563)

Nimmi Rangaswamy, Edward Cutrell (2013) “Anthropology, Development, and ICTs: Slums, Youth, and the Mobile Internet in Urban India” in ITD, volume 9, Issue 2, ICTD2012 Special Issue.

(Full article available here: http://itidjournal.org/index.php/itid/article/view/1052)

#mobile internet #applied anthropology #access #ethics #technology

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By Paul Spain

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